Questions to Ask Aristotle
Questions to ask Aristotle if you had an hour with him, written for a class discussion, an imagined interview or an essay. The 65 questions run from the good life, habit and character through friendship and politics, nature, logic and tragedy to his own life, with one group built on the questions Aristotle asked himself. Each has a note on what his books say and where to press him, including the places later readers think he went wrong.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Good life
If you had to say what a good life is in one sentence, what would it be?
Why ask it
He has a sentence ready: a good life is the soul's activity in line with virtue, kept up over a complete life. His word for it, eudaimonia, is closer to a life going well as a whole than to feeling good on a Tuesday, which is why he adds that one fine day does not make one, any more than one swallow makes a spring.
Are people born good, or do they have to be made good?
Why ask it
Neither, on his account. Nature hands us the capacity and habit finishes the job: a stone cannot be trained to fall upward, but a child can be trained to share. Follow up by asking how late is too late, since he puts great weight on how a person was raised.
Where exactly is the mean between cowardice and recklessness, and who decides?
Why ask it
The doctrine of the mean is routinely misread as moderation or as splitting the difference. His mean is relative to the person and the situation, so it cannot be worked out in advance. As for who decides, he says the person of practical wisdom, and it is fair to ask how you would spot one without already knowing the answer.
Why do we do what we know is bad for us?
Why ask it
His name for this is akrasia, usually translated as weakness of will. Socrates had argued that nobody acts against what they really know, and he replies that this plainly conflicts with what we see people do. Ask whether the person knew in the moment or only in general, because that distinction is where his answer lives.
Can a person be happy on the day everything goes wrong?
Why ask it
This presses on the least comfortable part of his ethics: he does not claim virtue makes you immune to fortune. Health, money, friends and luck all affect whether a life goes well, which sets him against anyone selling contentment as purely internal.
Should we wait until someone has died before calling their life happy?
Why ask it
The saying is Solon's, and he gives it a chapter of the Ethics. He finds it strange to call a person happy only once they can no longer do anything, yet he grants the worry behind it: a disaster late in life, like Priam's at the fall of Troy, can spoil a life that had gone well.
You say we become just by doing just acts. But how do we do the first one, before we are just?
Why ask it
He raises this objection against himself in the Ethics, and readers still argue over whether he met it. Watch for whether the answer leans on imitation, on being raised well, or on the difference between doing what a just person does and doing it as a just person would.
Is there a right amount of everything, or are some things simply wrong?
Why ask it
He says outright that some acts and feelings have no mean: there is no correct quantity of theft, murder or spite. Bring this up whenever someone reads the mean as permission to do a moderate amount of anything.
When is it right to be angry?
Why ask it
People expect a philosopher to recommend calm, and he counts never getting angry at the right things as a fault. His standard is anger at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time and for the right reason, and he admits that meeting all four is hard.
Is being funny a virtue?
Why ask it
Ready wit is on his list of virtues of character, placed between the buffoon who will say anything for a laugh and the boor who never jokes and resents those who do. A good one for a class that assumes virtue has to be solemn.
What can a person of practical wisdom do that someone who has memorized every rule cannot?
Why ask it
Phronesis is the capacity to see what this situation calls for, and he treats it as something acquired by experience rather than instruction. The test question is what a wise person does when two rules point in opposite directions.
Does pleasure belong in a good life, or does it get in the way?
Why ask it
He turns down both easy answers, that pleasure is the good and that it is bad. Pleasure completes an activity done well, so the thing to press is what a person has learned to enjoy, which he treats as the best evidence of their character.
How much money does a good life need?
Why ask it
Wealth, for him, is useful for the sake of something else and never the goal, yet he also says nobody can do fine things with no resources at all. Ask where enough stops, because he is harder on money-making without limit than on being rich.
What are we working for, if the point is not the work?
Why ask it
His word scholē, the root of school, means time free for its own use, not rest taken so that you can work more. He says we are busy in order to have leisure, which turns upside down the habit of treating busyness as proof that a life is going well.
Is contemplation really the highest life, or the one that happens to flatter philosophers?
Why ask it
He ranks the contemplative life above the active one, and the obvious suspicion is self-interest. A serious answer has to explain why a life almost nobody can afford counts as the best one, and whether the political life is second place or something else entirely.
Why did you say the young are the wrong audience for ethics?
Why ask it
His reason is that they lack experience of life and tend to follow their feelings, and he adds that the trouble is immaturity, not the number of years. A student asking this is entitled to push back: where else is the experience supposed to come from?
Friends and city
What is the difference between a friend you enjoy and a friend you would die for?
Why ask it
He sorts friendship into three kinds, based on utility, on pleasure, and on character, and only the third is stable, because the first two dissolve when the use or the pleasure does. Most people recognize their own friendships in the ranking and dislike where some of them land.
Would a person who had everything else still need friends?
Why ask it
Yes, and he is blunt about it: nobody would choose to live without friends even with every other good. The follow-up is why, since a self-sufficient person seems to need no one, and his reply is that we see a friend's life more clearly than our own.
How many close friends can one person really have?
Why ask it
Few. The best kind of friendship takes time and a shared daily life, and nobody can live that closely with a crowd. Carry this one out of the room and hold it up against a contact list.
Is it better to love or to be loved?
Why ask it
To love, he says, and his evidence is mothers who hand a child to others to raise and go on loving it, though the child does not know them and gives nothing back. He adds that most people would sooner be loved because it feels like being honored, a remark worth trying on anyone who counts followers.
Can a good person stay good outside a city?
Why ask it
His claim that a human being is a political animal is not a remark about voting. It is the position that the virtues need other people to be practiced on at all, which makes solitary goodness close to incoherent on his account.
Which is the best kind of government, and best for whom?
Why ask it
He sorts constitutions by who rules and in whose interest: one person, a few or the many, each with a sound form and a corrupt one. Then comes a second, more practical question, which arrangement most real cities could manage, and there his answer leans on a large middle class.
Why did you rank democracy among the corrupt forms?
Why ask it
By democracy he means rule by the poor majority in its own interest, which is narrower than the modern word. Press him with his own counterargument, that many ordinary people judging together can do better than a few experts, as a meal many contribute to can beat one host's.
What makes someone a citizen and not just a resident?
Why ask it
Taking part is his test: a citizen shares in judging and in holding office, ruling and being ruled in turn. By that measure plenty of people with passports today would not qualify, which is a good argument to start.
Is it fairer to give everyone the same, or to give people what they deserve?
Why ask it
Justice does two jobs in his account: sharing out goods and honors in proportion to merit, and putting right a wrong between two people as equals. Most quarrels about fairness are over which job applies and what counts as merit, a point on which he says democrats and oligarchs never agree.
When should a judge set the letter of the law aside?
Why ask it
Equity is his word for it: a correction of the law where its general wording fails a case the lawmaker did not foresee. Ask who can be trusted with that power, because the same door lets in favoritism.
Should a city educate every child the same way?
Why ask it
In the Politics he argues that schooling should be public and common to all citizens, not left to each household, because the city has one shared aim. His 'all' leaves out most of the people who lived there, and that is the place to push.
You were wrong about slaves and about women. What would have changed your mind?
Why ask it
Ask it plainly rather than apologetically. He defended natural slavery and treated women as subordinate, and both positions were contested in his own time. The useful question is what evidence his own method should have required of him and why he did not demand it.
Nature
How much of your work came from actually going and looking?
Why ask it
Large parts of his surviving writing are biological: descriptions of animals, their parts, how they reproduce and move. He got things wrong, but the method of collecting observations first is the part later science kept, and he is worth asking about it directly.
When you say everything has four causes, what does that get you that one cause does not?
Why ask it
Material, formal, efficient and final causes are usually taught as a list to memorize. The live question is what is lost when later thinkers keep only the efficient cause, and whether purpose can be dropped from an explanation of a living thing.
Does nature really do nothing without a purpose?
Why ask it
That nature does nothing in vain is a working rule he applies to teeth, wings and roots alike. Ask what he makes of parts that seem to do no job, and whether purpose in a living thing requires anyone to have intended it. He thought it did not.
Is the oak already in the acorn?
Why ask it
The acorn is the classroom example for his pairing of potential and actual: an oak in capacity and not yet in fact, which lets him explain change without anything coming from nothing. Then ask which comes first. He says the actual, since it takes a grown member of a kind to produce the seed.
What is a soul, on your account, and do plants have one?
Why ask it
For him the soul is what makes a body alive, its form and not a ghost inside it. So plants have one for feeding and growing, animals add perception, and humans add reasoning. The awkward part is whether any of it outlasts the body, where his text is brief and famously unclear.
Why did you think the heart did the thinking while the brain cooled the blood?
Why ask it
A fair question about a mistake reached by observation. His reasons were things he had seen, such as the heart's warmth and its early appearance in a developing chick. Careful looking turns out to be necessary and still not enough without a way to test.
Why did you say heavier things fall faster, and did you ever try it?
Why ask it
His physics was taught for well over a thousand years, and this is the claim schoolbooks use to show it failing. The better follow-up is why so few readers checked it for so long, which is a point about authority more than about him.
How did you know the earth is round?
Why ask it
On the Heavens gives his evidence: the earth's shadow on the moon in an eclipse always has a curved edge, and a traveler heading north or south sees different stars. Set it beside the questions about his mistakes, because here the same habit of looking got it right.
What keeps the heavens moving?
Why ask it
His answer is a first mover that causes motion without itself moving, and it moves things the way something loved moves the one who loves it. Later religious thinkers built a great deal on that passage, so ask how much of the building he would recognize.
Is there a god, and does it take any notice of us?
Why ask it
The god of his Metaphysics is a mind whose whole activity is thinking, and what it thinks about is thinking itself. Nothing in that account has it making the world or listening to anyone, so ask what he made of the temples and festivals of the cities he lived in.
Would there be time if nobody were there to count it?
Why ask it
After defining time as a number of change with respect to before and after, he raises this puzzle himself. If counting needs a mind, time seems to depend on one, and he leaves the matter more open than his reputation for having an answer to everything suggests.
Did the world have a beginning?
Why ask it
No, he argued: motion and time have always been. That clashed with the belief in creation held by the medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers who studied him most closely, and they did not all deal with it the same way. A good place to ask what a follower should do with a teacher's inconvenient conclusion.
Argument and art
Can you prove that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time?
Why ask it
He calls this the firmest principle of all and says it cannot be proved, because any proof would already rely on it. His defense is a challenge instead: get the doubter to say one word and mean something by it, and they have used the principle.
What makes an argument valid, as opposed to merely convincing?
Why ask it
The syllogisms of his logic are forms of inference in which the conclusion follows whatever the terms happen to be about. Ask for an argument that is valid and still ends somewhere false, then one that is persuasive and invalid. Telling those apart is the whole skill.
Which persuades people most: the speaker's character, the audience's feelings, or the argument itself?
Why ask it
These are his three means of persuasion, taught now as ethos, pathos and logos. He suggests character may be the strongest of the three, a claim worth testing against the last speech that changed your mind.
Is rhetoric a tool for truth or a weapon against it?
Why ask it
He wrote a full treatment of persuasion while holding that what is true is by nature easier to argue for. He also compares the skill to strength and wealth, good things that do great harm in the wrong hands. The gap to probe is persuasion that works because nobody stops to examine it.
What does tragedy do to an audience that an argument cannot?
Why ask it
His account of catharsis in the Poetics has been argued over for centuries because he says so little about it. Push on whether the effect is purging an emotion, clarifying it, or training it, since those are very different claims about why watching suffering is good for us.
Why does plot matter more to you than character?
Why ask it
In the Poetics plot is the soul of tragedy, and he says a play could work without developed characters but not without an action. Try it on a film you like: retell the events in one sentence and see whether the people or the story carried it.
How can a made-up story be truer than a history?
Why ask it
History, he says, reports what happened to one person, while poetry shows the kind of thing that happens, and that makes poetry the more philosophical of the two. Many readers take it as his reply to Plato's charge that poets deal in copies.
His questions
You listed four things we can ask about anything: is it so, why is it so, does it exist, and what is it. Which is hardest to answer?
Why ask it
Those four open the second book of his Posterior Analytics, and they are the nearest thing he left to a checklist of his own. Try them on any topic: the first pair concerns facts and their reasons, the second pair concerns things and their definitions.
You asked what the highest good is, the one everything else is done for. Why assume there is only one?
Why ask it
The Nicomachean Ethics opens on this question, and the objection is as old as the book: every chain of aims may end somewhere without all of them ending in the same place. See whether he argues for a single final end or takes it for granted.
You asked whether a human being has a job to do, the way an eye or a flute player has. What is it?
Why ask it
The eye and the flute player are his own examples, and his argument moves from what is distinctive about us, reasoning, to what our excellence must consist in. The objection worth putting to him is whether being the only creature that does something makes it your purpose, since we are also uniquely good at cruelty.
You asked what being is. Did you ever reach an answer that satisfied you?
Why ask it
He describes it as the question raised long ago, raised now and always puzzled over, and he narrows it to what a substance is. Readers still disagree whether his answer is the individual thing, its form or something else, so a straight reply would settle a great deal.
You wrote that philosophy begins in wonder. What was the first thing you wondered about?
Why ask it
The remark is in the Metaphysics, where people start by puzzling over nearby oddities and work up to the moon, the sun and the origin of everything. It is one of the few questions here that asks him for a memory and not a doctrine.
You claim that all people by nature desire to know. What about the ones who plainly do not?
Why ask it
That is the first sentence of the Metaphysics, and his evidence is the delight we take in our senses, sight above all, even when they are no use to us. How he handles the obvious counterexamples shows whether the claim is about what people do or what they are built for.
Why do you begin with what most people already believe, instead of starting from scratch?
Why ask it
His habit is to gather the common opinions and the views of the wise, set out the puzzles they produce, and keep whatever survives. The weak point to probe is what happens when ordinary opinion is simply wrong, as it was on several things he inherited and never questioned.
His life
Your father was a doctor. Did that make you a different kind of philosopher?
Why ask it
His father Nicomachus is recorded as physician to the Macedonian king, and medical examples run all through the ethics: the doctor treats this patient, not health in general. It is a simple way into why he trusts cases over abstractions.
Which of Plato's ideas did you keep after you rejected the rest?
Why ask it
He studied under Plato for roughly twenty years and then broke with him over whether Forms exist apart from things. Asking what survived the break is more interesting than asking why he left, and it exposes how much of the framework he never abandoned.
Why did you start your own school instead of taking over Plato's?
Why ask it
Around the time Plato died and the Academy passed to Plato's nephew, he left Athens, and he returned years later to teach at the Lyceum. Nobody knows how much was disappointment and how much was politics, so this is one to answer in character and argue over.
Did you really teach while walking?
Why ask it
Peripatetics, the name his followers went by, is linked either to strolling as he taught or to the covered walk at the Lyceum. A light question, and a reminder that much of what is told about his life comes from writers who lived centuries after him.
What did Alexander the Great take from your teaching, and what did he ignore?
Why ask it
He tutored Alexander as a boy, which is the most famous fact about him and the least informative, because the accounts of what he taught were written centuries later. The real question is what he thinks an education can and cannot do to someone who ends up with unlimited power.
Why did you leave Athens at the end of your life?
Why ask it
After Alexander died, feeling in Athens turned against anyone tied to Macedon, and he withdrew to Chalcis, where he died within about a year. A later report has him saying he would not let the city wrong philosophy a second time, which opens the subject of Socrates.
Which of your works are you proudest of?
Why ask it
He drops a hint at the end of the Sophistical Refutations. On reasoning, he says, there was nothing earlier to build on and he had to work it out by long trial, and he asks his listeners to forgive what is missing and be grateful for what is there.
People quote you as saying 'we are what we repeatedly do.' Did you ever say that?
Why ask it
He did not. The sentence is Will Durant's summary of him, written in the 1920s, though it is a fair gloss on his view of habit. It makes a useful test case for a class: check a quotation before you build an essay on it.
What do you make of having been called simply 'the Philosopher' for centuries?
Why ask it
Medieval writers used the title as though no other name were needed, and he became an authority to cite more than an inquirer to argue with. Given that he worked by testing received opinion, ask whether he would take it as praise.
What would you most want to see from the two thousand years after you?
Why ask it
A question that tells you what someone thinks was unfinished. In his case the honest candidates are biology, since he worked without a microscope, and the fate of the small city-state, since his politics assumes one.
Which of your surviving books would you have rewritten before letting anyone read it?
Why ask it
Much of what survives reads like lecture notes, and most of what he polished for publication, his dialogues included, is lost. It makes a good last question because the honest answer might be all of them.
Using these questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Words that trip people up
- Eudaimonia is usually translated as happiness, which misleads. Flourishing, or a life going well as a whole, is closer, and it is something you can be wrong about in the moment.
- Virtue translates arete, which means excellence of any kind. A knife has arete when it cuts well, so the word carries less moral solemnity than it does in English.
- The mean is not the average and not moderation. It is the right amount for this person in this situation, which is why he says it takes judgment rather than arithmetic.
- Political animal refers to the polis, a small self-governing city. It is a claim about needing a shared life with others, not a claim about government.
- Contemplation, theoria, means sustained attention to what is true rather than quiet reflection on your feelings.
The questions Aristotle asked
- About any subject he says we ask four things: whether something is the case, why it is the case, whether a thing exists, and what it is. The list opens the second book of the Posterior Analytics.
- About any single thing he asks four more: what it is made of, what makes it the kind of thing it is, what brought it about, and what it is for. These are the four causes.
- About a life he asks what the highest good is, the aim that every other aim serves. His name for it is eudaimonia, and most of the Nicomachean Ethics is spent asking what it consists of.
- About a human being he asks whether we have a function, as an eye or a flute player does. His answer, activity guided by reason, is the hinge of his account of the good life.
- About everything at once he asks what being is, which he narrows to what a substance is. He calls it the question that has always been asked.
- His own lists run to four, not three. The best-known three in his books are not questions at all but the means of persuasion: the speaker's character, the audience's feelings and the argument. The test of asking whether a remark is true, good and useful is a story usually told about Socrates, and it is not in Aristotle's writings. If an assignment mentions 'three questions Aristotle asked', check which three your course means before you write.
Running this in a class or a group
Take one strand at a time
The list is grouped so a session can stay on one subject: the good life, friends and the city, nature, argument and art, the questions he asked himself, and his life. Four or five questions from a single group go further in an hour than one from each.
Answer as yourselves before you answer as him
Take a question such as the one on friendship and have everyone sort their own before anyone quotes a text. The categories land harder when people have already put a real name in the wrong bucket.
Make someone argue the objection
Several of these questions are standing criticisms rather than curiosities, particularly the ones on habit, on contemplation, and on slavery. Assign someone to press them properly, or the discussion becomes an appreciation.
Keep the biology in the room
Groups tend to treat him as an ethicist alone. Spending ten minutes on how he described animals changes how the ethics reads, because the same habit of looking first runs through both.
If you are writing the dialogue yourself
- Let him stop to separate the senses of a word before he answers. He does it constantly, noting that a thing is 'said in many ways', and it is one of the most recognizable habits in how he argues.
- Have him start from what people commonly say and then test it, rather than from a principle. That order is his method.
- Give him room to say a question is badly formed. Refusing the premise is a real move, not a dodge.
- Resist making him serene. The writing is dry, dogged and often impatient, not soothing.
- Do not let him predict the future. The interesting version of the conversation is the one where he is genuinely surprised by what you tell him.